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Using game theory and examples of actual games people play, Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler show how the elements of chance and rules underlie all that happens in the universe, from genetic behavior through economic growth to the composition of music.

To illustrate their argument, the authors turn to classic games--backgammon, bridge, and chess--and relate them to physical, biological, and social applications of probability theory and number theory. Further, they have invented, and present here, more than a dozen playable games derived from scientific models for equilibrium, selection, growth, and even the composition of RNA.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

The content is fantastic, and I'm incredibly glad I purchased this book (actually, it was a gift). I'm only about halfway through, but already have ideas for a few dozen applications I want to implement based on the information contained there. Always a dabbler in game theory, it's nice to have my understanding of it expanded beyond _The Evolution of Cooperation_.

My only complaint is that it is very difficult to read. Translated from the German, it lost something along the way. I find myself rereading sections again and again- and not just because it's a little above my level of expertise but also because the translation is a bit opaque.

That complaint though is minor. Excellent work, and I'm ready to start applying this to software projects.

This unique book, co-authored by a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, has (to my taste) two positive and two negative features. In writing about "chance in popular science", any author faces a problem: use words only (thereby being vague) or put in equations (thereby detering many readers). The unique feature of this book is the invention of a selection of games (in the format of beads on a board, with moves affected by die throws) designed to mimic aspects of science models. The point is that "dice and rules" is a good description for scientific modeling involving probability; writing out explicit rules for dice games makes this point very clearly, compared to other popular science books.

As well as brief verbal mentions of some of the usual "chance in popular science" topics (game theory; quantum theory; evolution and population genetics; entropy and thermodynamical equilibrium and Shannon information) they describe a number of much more specific scientific topics, centered around their own expertize in biochemical reactions and structure. These are interesting and less standard topics, and every reader will be rewarded by learning something new.

An apt description of the book's style comes from a New Yorker review: "Fascinating .... has the character of the deepest sort of discussion among brilliant friends". But to my taste this style has two defects. The first: half the book digresses away from their "hard science" expertize to discuss classical (Platonic solids, Goethe, Marxist dialectic) and 1970s-fashionable (Chomsky, Prigogine, catastrophe theory, "limits to economic growth", Popper's 3 worlds and Eccles neurobiology) intellectual theories, without much coherence.Read more ›

This book changed my view of things by supplying a logical basis for the relation among particles and giving me a new view of randomness and order. This is one of the most important books I ever read. Read it slowly. Don't worry if you have to read a sentence several times. It is worth it.

Manfred Eigen, the main author, is no dilletante. He has a Nobel Prize in chemistry. The book explains, using diverse examples from all over science, how rules working in a random enviroment create emergent patterns that find themselve a niche. Complexity theory starts here. Lots of graphics. I rate it one of the best books of the 20th century for the general reader with intellectual curiosity.

This book has an interesting approach to areas of discrete mathematics. It uses board games and bead games to illustrate some of the ways in which local rules contribute to global behaviour. People with a background in complexity, cellular automata and agent based modelling will probably really enjoy the first half of the book. Unfortunately, the games were not always well described and the emerging behaviour was often unclear. I felt I needed to program the games to have any chance of really understanding the points the authors were attempting to make. Those without a programming or discrete maths background are unlikely to get anything substantial from this first half. Those with such a background, however, could easily be inspired to explore in many directions.

The second half of the book is simply a mess. It moves into issues such as population growth and music. These issues each have a separate chapter, which are linked only by the fact that mathematics is used for analysis. There is little in the way of conclusion or narrative so it is never clear why these issues are included. Furthermore, the language is awkward so extensive rereading is required and, even then, the points are generally unclear.